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On the sixth anniversary of Emiliano Sala’s death, Cardiff City’s chairman, Mehmet Dalman, hoped he would be able to speak about some good borne from tragedy: how the shocking loss of a player and the pilot of the plane that killed them had served as football’s wake-up call to ensure such a disaster would not happen again.
Instead, Dalman is still imploring football’s authorities to learn from Sala’s death and beef up regulation of the sport’s shady transfer industry. So far, Dalman says, nothing of significance has changed.
“You would have thought the death of two individuals would have caused an outcry,” he says. “But it hasn’t. It’s not proven to be the catalyst for regulatory change that we hoped.”
On 21 January 2019 the plane taking Sala to Wales from his former club in Nantes crashed into the Channel. The 28‑year‑old Argentinian striker had just become Cardiff’s record signing, at £15m, and was the club’s great hope in what proved a futile attempt to avoid relegation from the Premier League. It took almost two weeks for the wreckage, containing Sala’s body, to be located. The pilot David Ibbotson’s body has never been found.
Amid the outpouring of grief began a series of legal battles that rumble on. Cardiff’s claim that they should not be liable for the transfer fee because Sala was not officially their player when he died was rejected by football’s governing body Fifa, the court of arbitration for sport and the Swiss federal tribunal.
Cardiff have since lodged a commercial claim against Nantes for more than £100m. A verdict is expected this year.
Cardiff also reached an out‑of‑court settlement last year with the agent Willie McKay, who acted as an intermediary in Sala’s transfer and helped to arrange the fateful unlicensed private flight to Cardiff. Ibbotson, 59, did not hold a commercial pilot’s licence or a qualification to fly at night, and his rating to fly the single-engine Piper Malibu plane in question had expired.
McKay was neither registered as an intermediary in England nor as an agent in France at the time of Sala’s death. However, he was acting for Nantes alongside his agent son, Mark, who stood to earn 10% of any transfer fee Nantes made if Sala was sold to a UK club. “Why get registered when my son is registered?” he told the Guardian in 2019.
Some may believe the time has come for Cardiff to let it go; to move on. Dalman insists his motivations run deeper than wanting to recoup the club’s money. He believes justice for Sala can emerge only from institutional change over football’s transfer business.
“My background is finance,” he says. “In 1986, the ‘big bang’ changed the entire way we did business in the City of London. What football needs is a big bang. It needs to be taken by the scruff of the neck and review the regulation.
“There are two fundamental drivers. One is the people in the industry who are agents and intermediaries. They are non-regulated apart from the basic licence that they apply for. The politics, threats and blackmails that go on are beyond imagination.
“The second is, why do clubs use these agents and intermediaries? These questions need to be addressed. I’ve seen absolutely no movement [since Sala’s death].”
Dalman believes Sala would be alive if effective regulations had been in place. “The transaction was done by an unlicensed agent,” he says. “If clubs could not use unlicensed agents, this would not have occurred. Two people have lost their lives and no one has been accountable. How is that right?
“No agent should be able to take a player that belongs to another club, and put them in an aeroplane, without the express position of that particular club. You had an agent acting for a selling club, making arrangements for a player of a buying club. That would never happen in a fully regulated environment.”
McKay was approached for comment. In a statement released upon his settlement with Cardiff last year, McKay said he had “provided evidence to assist the Dorset coroner, Dorset police, Civil Aviation Authority and the Air Accidents Investigation [Branch] and always acted openly and honestly during all the investigations into the tragic death of Emiliano,” adding: “Throughout all the above investigations, we have been found to be innocent of any wrongdoing of any kind leading up to the awful events on 21 January 2019.”
Although Dalman denied that Cardiff’s plight in a Championship relegation battle is related directly to Sala’s death, he suggested the club “in many ways” still feels the effects of what happened six years ago. Cardiff have not returned to the top flight or paid more than £5.5m for a player since.
“We got relegated that season [2018-19] by two points,” Dalman says. “We had this player and if he had helped us win one game, we would not be in the predicament we are today.
“We have an owner [Vincent Tan] who finances the club. He forked out just shy of €20m to buy the most expensive player the club has ever bought and he has no player. So he has become less confident about the whole system of transfers.
“He has become very cautious every time we see a player that has any value attached to them.”
